Jack Thompson, a High-Caliber Troll

People who have beeen following the drama unfolding at GamePolitics are undoubtedly familiar with a fellow by the name of Jack Thompson, a lawyer with nothing to lose and hell-bent to destroy every "pixelante" on Earth. I'm probably not alone in my opinion if I say that even if JT is "certified" sane, that should be somewhat re-evaluated.

Let me do a little bit of digging.

Now, GP doesn't allow anonymous users to post anymore, thanks to Thompson's interesting antics. I have a LiveJournal account, so that doesn't touch me, but it probably annoyed a lot of other people. Strike one: If your comments are bad enough to inspire a policy change, that should be a good time to reconsider what the heck is going on.

Secondly, Thompson posts a lot. Really, really a lot. And obviously, not even remotely related to whatever the heck GP is posting - well, sometimes it is related, generally to show off his great trigger-finger itching and overreacting ability.

Thirdly... well... Bear with me, here's some rambling from a random user:

Back somewhat over ten years ago, when I started to use the Internet really seriously, the place to be was the Usenet. In the Usenet, all you had for authentication was really your name. You could identify other users by their name and email address, and that was that. And everyone engaged in civil discussion; even if there were clueless newbies, even they got clue eventually. If you didn't like to see some discussion threads, or comments from some people, you just added that to killfile - which is a brutal way of saying "list of people whose comments you don't want to see.

Now, there was always some kind of group of people for which none of that applied. They had no civility and pushed their own gibberish wherever they went, no matter how inappropriate it was, no matter how annoyed it made people. If people started ignoring them with killfiles, they started morphing, changing their name or email or even ISP to get around those.

They were called trolls.

Now trolls are very common even to this day, they have just spread frigging everywhere.

Some might draw attention to the fact that Jack Thompson is a certified lawyer. Okay, so he is an educated troll. They're the worst.

One thing I don't get is this: Since the anon policy came about, Jack Thompson got an user account. He's been repeatedly banned. I mean repeatedly. Apparently free LiveJournal accounts can now be got without invite codes, otherwise I might have labelled him as a rich troll too. Now I'm just labelling him as a troll who also wastes perfectly good space in the database. Yay.

People are calling for a ban, and I would too. Thompson's stuff was first interesting, then it got just annoying, reminding me of the dark, uncivilised bits from the Usenet's otherwise fun history.

Jack Thompson's case is getting continually weirder and weirder and weirder. I guess the next logical step would be a crusade against Wikipedia. Shame I won't probably be reporting more on this guy; I don't want this blog to turn into a (shiver) Political Blog™.